


Rosaries of farewells

by cruelmagic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 08:40:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10213760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruelmagic/pseuds/cruelmagic
Summary: This is how you design a civil war.(A piece I started writing a long time ago and decided to post it.)





	

Every good story has a beginning and an ending—he knows it, he knows stories well, they're what got him through the boarding school and older students tormenting, taunting, crushing; through restless nights when his mind wouldn't quiet, quiet—raucous unbearable, his hands blistered, arms bruised, mind quickening forward, oh, so tired, still unable to stop. Words like rosary beads, providing a haven, providing a constant on which to focus. (He was too young for alcohol back then, too innocent for meaningless sex, too far away from everything for living too fast, too dangerously, recklessly. He was a prodigy, a legacy, even though he couldn't comprehend what it meant—too inexperienced, still hopeful. Hopeful that his father would visit and take him back, that he would tell him he's proud of him. Of course, that never happened.)  
He knows stories, he sees he's a part of one, out of his reach, out of his control.  
Control. Looing grip, the whole world slipping away in a matter of seconds. You close your eyes and you can't wake up again. Dreams and nightmares, their shadows falling on your wakeful hours, still restless, unquiet, the beads like rain falling on the floor. You close your eyes, you can't find them again. This story in pieces and you have to wait for a narrator to pick them up for you, to make them whole, to make them into a new constellation, unrecognisable.

He considers this beginning.  
It began in a cave.  
It began in a garden, in a back alley.  
It began with his father playing God, it began with a boy ready to fight for the world.  
It began seventy years too late, it began harshly, rashly, during a fight. They were on the same side back then, and yet, they stood in the opposite corners of it.  
It began with a boy shielding his body from the world to survive. It began with a boy making his body into a shield to protect what he loved.  
“We've both come so far,” he says closing his eyes for the nightmares to come, “is there a way back?”  
“You tell me,” he replies, stubborn, always so stubborn. Unyielding.  
And you want to yell, to reveal your soul, but it's too late now, the beads crushed under the shoe by your friend, of your foe.

This is how you lose your soul by forgetting it bit by bit. In a prayer so feverish the world seems to burn before your very eyes. Maybe it does—how will you put out this fire. How will you survive?  
“How do you do it?” he asks.  
“One day at the time,” he answers, his gaze down, fists clenched. It wasn't fire, it was ice and time that took everything from him, and he still felt frozen inside. Drawn to the fire.  
“Don't go near,” he wanted to shout from inside of his metal suit, but the words failed him, the narrative took a different turn.  
Maybe it's all in his head, a conversation with a ghost. When the ghost smiles it's full of uncontainable sadness, memories engraved into the skull of future days lost. A smile of somebody abandoned by their stories and thrown into a different one, somehow familiar but still so foreign. You want to ask him to join yours but it's too late, it has always been too late. So you let it pass by you, the smile fades and the past catches up, haunting you, haunting him, the world a burial ground. You never say the words because they can't change anything, he's too far away from you, you two on separate paths leading to the same direction—the world without the other.

*

You often wonder about the would-bes and never-bes. They tell you not to, nothing good comes out of loving her too much to stay and loving him not enough to follow. It's the restless nights that get you, unquiet of the soul frozen-stiff. You're un-dead, un-living, a remnant, a memory that lingered for too long. You look at your hands (sometimes you can't recognise yourself, the intensity, exuberance of thoughts, they're you but skewed, intensified. The doors once closed are now opened but you soon discover that once a threshold is crossed, they close shut, and you can't go back.)  
They never shiver but you think they should. There's something missing in you and you think they took it out, cut it pieces, studied and called it your soul. You care too much, you don't care enough, you're not what they bargained for, a liability with too much power and no power at all. You don't let them know you know it, too. They call you a hero and you nod. You never say these words out loud: “I'm not a hero. I survived and it cost me everything.” If you did, you'd unravel and no one would be able to pick you back up again and make a whole out of the broken pieces. All strings and regrets; kisses fade, people die, the world moves forward and never stops for you to catch up, to rest. You carry on, one day at the time, one mission after another, and you never ever stop.

A story turned into history, now carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. They should rename him, Atlas, will you carry our sins of forgetting, of remaking, of re-imagining? We will ostracise you, you're not human, you're a hero, start acting like one. Put on the suit and save us, save us, save us. We will never stop this cry, this prayer, will you be our salvation?  
We will build you an olive garden, we will give you followers. And one will betray you, or maybe you will betray him (it's difficult to keep track of these things these days). Isn't it how this story goes? Save us, save us, save us.  
You shiver, the world on your shoulder seems to crumble. A bead after bead after bead.  
Is this how this story ends? With them restless, with them crushed. With the world broken in half, a rift too deep, too far away to cross.

*

This is how they're born, made and scarred, deformed, deranged. A hero is just one step away from a villain. They hate each other, they love each other, can't live apart, can't stay too close—they'd burn. They call themselves a team, but they're a spider's web, silver threads covered in mist, an enchantment of light, secrets gleaming in the sun. A venomous spider hidden underneath a leaf.  
“Was it our fault?” they ask but no one wants to give an answer. Are they controlled, uncontrollable, harbingers of doom. They were the light all of the darkness craved, they were the shadows where all the monsters lived.  
They fought and they killed and all was for nothing, for more blood, for more deaths, a cycle they wanted to escape, but couldn't without dying first.  
“If you call yourself Avengers, it means you have to fail first.”  
They created the problem and they made a mess out of it, left before anyone asked to clean it up, to decide if it was even worth it.  
“Was it worth it?” Banner asks.  
“We saved the world,” Steve replies.  
“It doesn't feel like it,” Natasha says and they drink, and they fight to forget.  
“What have we done?” no one says but everyone wishes to have the guts to say out loud.  
Are they a reaction, a response, or the cause? They try not to wonder, the heart pounds faster, harder in the chest, and yet the breath escapes them. It's better when you don't have time to think, time to sleep, time to dream. Old fears replaced by new nightmares.

*

She breathes his breath, tastes the coffee, the blood, the dirt. He sings her lullabies, kisses away the fears, the snow etches underneath her eyelids.  
“What will we do tomorrow?” she asks drinking away his warmth.  
“I don't know,” Clint says, craving more coffee, craving the red like blood so thick, so cold, and yet always caring, caring too much.  
“You never know.”  
“Because I never have an answer. I just do what I think is right.”  
She laughs, there are pearls in her laugh, just like there are precious stones in her tears. She’s made of gems, rubies, opals, diamonds, and underneath all this there are hidden songs that he carves out of her. Songs she didn’t want to hear, songs she took for screams.  
“Sing, sing for me,” she whispers, his lips so near her skin.  
And he sings a song of forgiving for this is as close as they ever will come to say “I love you”. They were both made of cuts and wounds and bruises—bad people made into heroes.  
“Are we forgiven or our deeds merely forgotten?”  
It’s a song with a broken beat, these are the words once so vibrant now soft sighing, an ode turned into a lament. A gentle melody of snow falling at midnight and fog raising before the dawn.  
They’re shadows and so there they are to stay.

*

So you’re a monster, you keep telling yourself at night.  
You think about the good doctor Jekyll with a demon inside him.  
Two sides of a man that are separate, or so everyone says.  
But Hyde’s baseness comes not from a demon, comes not from the Devil, it comes from Jekyll uninterrupted himself.  
This rage isn’t godsend, it’s not something you’ve experienced for the first time.  
It was in you when you were a little kid with scrawny short legs, with fists so small the bullies laughed in your face, and then beat you, beat you, beat you.  
It was in your mother so weak and yet so loving. In her every loving kiss placed on a bruise, fingers so careful with the cuts. “You have to tell the teachers.” “They know, they all know.”  
It was in him when he was in college, his friends partying, him studying, falling in love and falling out of it. It was in him when his mother died, and his father came late to the funeral. “How could you?” “It’s not like it matters anymore.” He punched him then, his father with a fox’s smile, a genius and a skunk. His father laughed. “Were it any other day, boy, you’d be dead. But one funeral today is enough.”  
One day Rogers will tell him, the serum was supposed to magnify who you were. It made a monster out of Red Skull, it made a symbol out of Steve Rogers.  
Maybe the serum did work, it was only that the subject was not a good man. Too much Hyde in depraved Jekyll.

*

They call you a god and you laugh, and you laugh, and you laugh. Your brother used to say that and it turned him mad.  
You’re not gods, you’re technologically more advanced. For some it seems to be magic. It’s not. It’s trickery and craftiness. It’s lies, promises broken, families in ruins. It’s your brother laying a gentle kiss on your forehead and saying “I love you, therefore I shall kill you.”  
You seem to be above such matters, a god with a heart of gold, who fell and rose stronger than before. But you’re not.  
You dream about falling, your fall, his fall, you two falling together, always. Doomed you are. Sons of Odin, from the House of Ruination. You will bring destruction upon yourselves, upon the worlds. They’ll call it Ragnarok and brother will devour brother.

*

One day they will face each other and it will destroy them.  
Because they love each other and they see themselves in each other. And you'll pray for forgiveness, and you'll pray for rest, and you'll pray but the prayer won't be heard, the beads of the rosaries will scatter and they'll never be able to pick them all back up and re-assemble.  
Love and hatred, and self-pity, and fear will tear them apart, no matter how strong they'll try to hold on, how deep they'll pierce the skin.  
This is how you design a fairy tale, but they haven't realised yet that they are the monsters of it. The monsters of the world.


End file.
